In order to be successful in whatever it is that you are trying to accomplish, you need to be very adamant in understanding you need to do whatever it takes to reach the goal that you have set out for yourself.

I understand life gets busy, but ultimately, time belongs to no one; time is something that we choose to spend on whatever it is that occupies our day. We all make choices, however in the end, our choices make us.

The first thing I manage is structure. Taking a step back from training, it is important to pre-frame what you do in your day. Having a whiteboard is a great way to put your tasks on paper, this way they can easily be managed and stress can be simply mitigated without having to overthink. This makes isolating each task much more efficient and more proactive in addressing deadlines that you have set for yourself.

And as far as training goes, you need to be fully focused in, you must dial into every single training session. Of course, everyone has off days, even the highest level athletes. With that being said, two things can come from that - self-deprecation or reflection. You can either beat yourself up for how you may have performed that said day or you can reflect, grow and accomplish whatever missing piece it was that may have led to a less desired outcome. This might include things such as: sleep quality, under-eating, improper management of fatigue, the list can go on and there are several possible outcomes to that. Isolating and removing the problem that may have put you there in the first place is the proactive solution to take.

You may observe in a gym situation, that many people spend too much time on their phone, and ultimately are not pushing to their true capability. If you are one of these people you must understand that in order for the body to undergo change and adaptation, it must undergo a high degree of stimulus and stress that pushes it in to an uncomfortable zone. The more you grow, the more uncomfortable you are going to get BUT, with consistency, you build your body to be more fit to handle these situations and physically stressful situations. This is adaptation and growth and mainly, new physiological and psychological development. This notion is not to say that you have to push yourself to absolute failure, in fact, I would advise against that. You do NOT want to be pushing yourself to TOTAL failure when you train. It has been proven that this is unnecessary and will actually wear out the nervous system and tax it much quicker. Over-stressing also provokes the release of the hormone cortisol, which will actually catabolize or break down muscle tissue to deal with the situation at hand. This can be “over training” however, take that term with a grain of salt, as it can commonly be misunderstood. Understanding that you need to get comfortable with being uncomfortable, is a place that takes time getting to and is a learning curve that must be understood by every athlete or gym attendee in order to truly see growth!

At the end of the day, in order to keep yourself accountable, it is a good idea to set sub-maximal output. This means to safely perform an exercise (once the movement pattern is safely and clearly understood) to just below that of a max output. When you do this, you see the areas that need working on. Remember that we are only as strong as our weakest link, so to safely perform that said exercise to its near maximum potential, will reveal areas that you may have otherwise missed.